Feminist Studies

Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc.  alexis lothian Choose Not toWarn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy omg, aCaDemia is having the warnings Debate. A year or so ago, I typed this message into an online chat window. I was talking about the eruption in blog posts, higher education think pieces, and intense Facebook arguments about “trigger warnings” in the classroom —especially classrooms in which gender, race, and sexuality are the focus of discussion—instigated by student-led campaigns to standardize notifications of potentially traumatic content.1 The potentially chilling effect of syllabus warnings on feminist and queer inquiry led to fears that vulnerable faculty might lose the freedom to teach “complex, potentially disturbing materials” without the risk of censure.2 Placed in wider cultural context, trigger warnings became a stand-in for the rise of a student-activist generation whose emphasis on sensitivity seemed to exemplify the neoliberal individualization and depoliticization endemic to contemporary capitalism.3 Meanwhile, other voices from inside and 1. Colleen Flaherty, “Trigger Unhappy,” Inside Higher Ed, April 14, 2014, https:// www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/14/oberlin-backs-down-triggerwarnings -professors-who-teach-sensitive-material. 2. 7 Humanities Professors, “Trigger Warnings Are Flawed,” Inside Higher Ed, May 29, 2014, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essayfaculty -members-about-why-they-will-not-use-trigger-warnings. 3. Jack Halberstam, “You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger, and Trauma,” Bully Bloggers, July 5, 2014, https://bullybloggers .wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoricof -harm-danger-and-trauma. 744 Alexis Lothian outside academia were insisting that trigger warnings could provide necessary consideration for students living with everyday trauma, including survivors of endemic racialized, classed, and gendered violence.4 In these fast-paced and contentious debates, it has often been the idea of the trigger warning, more than the practice of warning itself, on which the conversation centers. There is a shared standard narrative in which a student’s real or imagined articulation of a state of being triggered shades into teachers’ and students’ fear of triggering someone, and this fear leads to a demand for future enactments that would cut out any potentially offensive or uncomfortable material. This certainly may sometimes reflect reality.5 But when I messaged my friend in that tone of wearied recognition, I was referencing a different, though related, conversation in which similar arguments played out to different conclusions. While the ascendance of trigger-warning discourse is usually traced to feminist bloggers’ use of the language of trauma and to the flowering of social justice discourse on Tumblr, such warnings have a distinct history in the networks and communities surrounding fan fiction and fan video. This essay aims to offer some insights from that debate in a form that may prove useful for those contemplating the significance of trigger warnings in feminist academia. Within the networked publics of both academia and fandom, conversations about warnings, and the personal and organizational policies that get developed as a result of those conversations, are world-making practices. I ask what might happen if we let go of questions around the legitimacy of triggers and traumas and asked instead what it is that requests for warnings are asking for—not on the level of individual experience, but in terms of the physical and discursive spaces that such requests, and the answers to them, create. In contrast to academics’ 4. Julia Serano, “Regarding ‘Generation Wars’: Some Reflections Upon Reading the Recent Jack Halberstam Essay,” Whipping Girl (blog), July 13, 2014, http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/regarding-generation-wars-some. html; Allison Hitt, “Melanie Yergeau, ‘Disable All the Things,’” Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, June 24, 2014, http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative. org/2014/06/24/melanie-yergeau-disable-all-the-things-kn1. 5. Rani Neutill, “My Trigger-warning Disaster: 9 1/2 Weeks, The Wire and How Coddled Young Radicals Got Discomfort All Wrong,” Salon, October 28, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/i_wanted_to_be_a_supporter_of_ survivors_on_campus_and_a_good_teacher_i_didnt_realize_just_how_ impossible_this_would_be. Alexis Lothian 745 predominant concerns with surveillance, academic freedom, and neoliberal commodification of the self, fans’ arguments over triggers and warnings have...